Olha Stefanishyna, a 40-year-old from Odesa, Ukraine, is kept awake at night by the distant rumble of passenger planes flying above her house in a quiet corner of Washington, D.C. It’s a sound so common that most residents tune it out.
Ukraine’s new ambassador to the United States has trouble falling asleep.
Olha Stefanishyna, a 40-year-old from Odesa, Ukraine, is kept awake at night by the distant rumble of passenger planes flying above her house in a quiet corner of Washington, D.C. It’s a sound so common that most residents tune it out.
But if she was back in Kyiv, the buzz could only mean one thing: an incoming Russian Shahed drone. “I understand that I’m in Washington, but I just can’t [fall asleep]—because I hear a Shahed,” she said in an interview with Foreign Policy at the Ukrainian Embassy.
Still, the mental echoes of the war are more of an annoyance, if anything. What really bothers Stefanishyna is falling behind on events in Ukraine. “The most stressful thing is that when I wake up in the morning, I see that it’s already lunchtime in Kyiv,” she said. “I wake up in a very bad mood.”
That dose of wartime pragmatism forms part of how Stefanishyna sees her new role, perhaps one of the
Continue Reading on Foreign Policy
This preview shows approximately 15% of the article. Read the full story on the publisher's website to support quality journalism.